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Once a Thief was a television show based on John Woo's 1996 movie/series pilot of the same name.[1] The series lasted one season, had 22 episodes, and fannish interest was guaranteed because the character of Victor Mansfield was played by Nicholas Lea, who played fan-favourite Alex Krycek on the X-Files.

The fame of Krycek's fannish nickname Ratboy found its way into Once a Thief canon when in the X-Files homage episode The Director's Files, the Mulder impersonator snapped, "Don't call me Spooky, Ratboy" to Nick Lea's character.

Show synopsis

Two of the main characters, Mac Ramsey and Li Ann Tsei, are thieves who have been adopted by the godfather of a Hong Kong crime family. At the beginning of the pilot they are secret lovers but their relationship is in peril because the biological son of the godfather wants to marry Li Ann. After getting a closer look at the family business, which includes arms dealing and killing, Mac convinces Li Ann to run away with him. The plan doesn't work out, the two get separated, Li Ann gets caught by the police, and the last time she sees Mac he is trapped inside an exploding warehouse. She thinks he is dead, grieves, and ultimately moves on. However, Mac is very much alive and in prison.

Eighteen months after the explosion, the Director of a secret Canadian Agency blackmails Mac into working for her. When he arrives in Vancouver, he learns that Li Ann works for the same Agency. She is now engaged to another agent, the ex-cop Victor Mansfield (who was framed for something he didn't do and spent some time in jail too), and all three of them are on the same team. Vic and Mac hate each other at first sight. After episode three, Li Ann breaks off the engagement and says that she has no interest in marrying either of them. They try to be friends but that doesn't stop all the sparks between Vic and Mac. Meanwhile they have to solve their cases or get into trouble with the Director, who is a scary lady with an interest in results (and she owns a sex club).

Fandom

Once a Thief was to some degree an offshoot of the X-Files slashfandom and the fannish output leans heavily to slash. While the canon setup of Vic, Mac and Li Ann as a threeway professional partnership mirrors the relationships on Leverage or even Pirates of the Caribbean that led to popular threesomeships in those fandoms, OaT fandom existed before that kind of story became mainstream in fandom.

Fanfiction

The fanfiction was mostly Mac/Vic slash, with occasional Li Ann/The Director f/f, and several X-Files crossovers. Some of these crossovers were Mulder/Victor, in other stories Vic and Krycek were the same person. There were same actor crossovers for both Krycek and the character Nick Lea played on Highlander.

OaT fanfic was originally included on TER/MA, the main Mulder/Krycek archive and RatB predecessor, and later on RatB before The Theban Band created the Once a Thief archive The Agency. The only zine of the fandom was the two-volume The OaT Zine[2] that was published and illustrated by The Theban Band and later released to the net. The stories and manips were Vic/Mac slash.

Fanfic Examples and Resources

Going Deep by AnneZo is an enduringly popular slash story that uses the Undercover in a Gay Bartrope to get Vic and Mac together. The duo have to pretend to be lovers after moving to a gay neighborhood to solve a missing person case

OaT Works at the AO3 - some older stories from the nineties and at least one Yuletide story from 2010

Vids

There were a few vids made for the series but it is sometimes difficult to properly credit them today because not everyone who has a vid on tape knows who created it.[3] There are at least three of these difficult to credit OaT vids by an M/K vidder:

Dancing In The Dark showed a jaded and tired Vic who finds in Mac the spark that was missing in his life. The "dancing in the dark" part of the refrain featured footage of Mac and Vic rolling around on the ground during one of their fights and some screenshots from the pilot episode where they prove to be very acrobatic while hanging from a chandelier. Different in tone was All For You, an upbeat Mac/Vic slash vid that showed their getting together as somehow inevitable because their dynamic is that of an old married couple, even if they don't know what exactly it is they see in each other. Time, on the other hand, was a melancholic vid where Vic, Mac, and Li Ann all try to find love somewhere but it never works out and in the end they all die.

Ivy was one M/K vidder who had several Mac/Vid slash vids[4] and some OaT gen vids[5] on her site. Some of these vids were hosted on a Krycek/Marita site as well.[6] Compared to what is common today, the files were very small (only 6-10MB ).

Notes

↑Fans in other countries often used their X-Files sources or asked other X-Files fandom contacts for copies. The tapes usually included as many episodes as would fit on a tape because postage was expensive and fans sometimes shared these costs and the cost for converting a master tape from NTSC to PAL. The people receiving copies of copies of the master tape often had no idea where the tapes originally came from and the fans who copied their own copies for fellow fans sometimes included vids from other sources. Without credits, these vids were as anonymous as the episode sources and few vids on these copied tapes came with credits.